The Movie Review: 'The Hunting Party'

By Christopher Orr

It's not an easy thing to balance jocular irony and geopolitical
earnestness in a film, and it's harder still when it's a film about war.
David O. Russell somehow managed the feat in his 1999 Three Kings; Andrew Niccol fell somewhat short in his 2005 Nicholas Cage vehicle Lord of War; and now Richard Shepard has missed the mark altogether in The Hunting Party.

At the opening of the film onscreen text informs us that "Only the
most ridiculous parts of this story are true." This playful boast is
utter hogwash, as viewers will soon conclude themselves. Shepard's movie
is about a down-on-his-luck American war correspondent, Simon (Richard
Gere), who persuades his former cameraman, Duck (Terrence Howard), and a
young TV producer, Benjamin (Jesse Eisenberg), to accompany him on a
lunatic mission to capture a Serbian war criminal known as "the Fox"
(Ljubomir Kerekes), who has evaded UN authorities in Bosnia for years.
In the course of their efforts, they are mistaken for CIA agents by a UN
official and, after protesting to no avail, decide they might as well
go along with the unintentional deception. Word of their "mission"
ultimately reaches the Fox, however, and the hunters soon become the
hunted. The subsequent cat-and-mousing features abductions, beatings, an
intervention by the real CIA, a couple of face-to-face encounters with
the Fox, and more than one execution avoided at the last second.

The problem with this "true" story is that nothing in those last two sentences actually happened. The Hunting Party is based on a 2000 Esquire article
by Scott Anderson, which described how he and a few fellow war
correspondents jokingly decided to see whether they could track the
real-life Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic and, in the process,
were mistaken for CIA men and ultimately reprimanded by authorities. But
the edge-of-the-seat suspense and intrigue of Shephard's movie is pure
invention: Anderson et al. never encountered Karadzic, and were never
targeted by his minions. They certainly never succeeded in--well, I
won't give away the film's conclusion; I'll just note that it's another
fabrication, and a silly, obvious one at that. So while the basic
premise of the movie may be ridiculous but true, it quickly wanders into
the far less interesting terrain of the ridiculous and entirely made
up.

It's not hard to see how this happened. Anderson's tale of kicking
around Bosnia with his buds, half-pretending to be secret agents and
amazed to discover that some people actually believed they were, was a
neat little serving of black comedy. It just wasn't very cinematic. So
Shepard (who also wrote the script) juiced it up with shootouts and
chases through the woods, ransacked hotel rooms and near-beheadings. He
also provided extra helpings of that most overused of Hollywood
ingredients, backstory. Simon, the protagonist, is so weighed down by
conflicting motivations--he's in it for money, for professional
vindication, to avenge the murder of a girl he loved--it's a wonder he
has the energy to do anything at all. "My whole situation," Simon
explains at one point, "everything bad that's ever happened to me, was
because of [the Fox]"--and, absurdly enough, in the fantasy context of
the movie it's true.

None of this would necessarily matter
if Shepard's film worked on its own terms, but it doesn't. It careens
errantly from brazen whimsy to ponderous moralizing, with long
expository stretches in between. (It needs, after all, to explain to us
both a war and a fictional warlord's place in it.) A voiceover by
Terrence Howard's character is deployed to get us over the rough
patches, but it's too bland to add any real narrative momentum. And
while Gere has moments of charm in the central performance, his
character is patched together from too many disparate parts ever quite
to come to life.

And then there's the dialogue. Though the film aims for an air of
geopolitical sophistication, many of the exchanges are B-movie cliches:
"She may seem beautiful to you, but she will cut your balls off and
sell them as trinkets"; "Putting your life in danger is actually living.
The rest is television"; "If I ever hear from you again, the CIA will
be on you like a cheap suit from Men's Wearhouse." Black comedy requires
a drier wit than this; without it, we get a half-hearted action flick
burdened with geopolitics.

The Hunting Party is not a terrible movie. But it is a clumsy, frustrating one, an ill-conceived effort to inflate an ironic Esquire
article into a grand, genre-melding black comedy/political
thriller/action movie. Shepard managed a similar feat a couple of years
ago with The Matador, a wickedly funny film
about political assassination. But this time out, his reach exceeds his
grasp, and the movie's contradictory impulses spin out in all
directions. In Scott Anderson's original article, a lieutenant colonel
actually told him, "You know, in my twenty years of service, this is the
strangest thing I've ever been involved in. It'd make a helluva movie."
If only.